The Everest Flight

Well it was a cool experience but we didn’t see Everest.  It was a very cloudy day, and they took us up, and we had some good views, but the clouds were thick and many-layered.  We saw some mountains amidst all the clouds, and I thought I saw one that might be Everest, but after a while they turned the plane around and said we couldn’t see Everest so they were going to go land.  We never paid anything for the flight, and if we want to go again they will arrange it.  Melissa has to work tomorrow, so we’ll figure out what her schedule is like and try to fit it in another day.

 

We were picked up early and had a quicker ride to the airport, since the streets are mostly empty at 6 a.m. (but not entirely--there were a lot of people up and about already).  We went to the smaller domestic terminal, from which flights leave for about 6 other airports in Nepal, and the mountain flight is a daily special.

 

As we climbed, we got pretty good views of Kathmandu.  It is surrounded by green hills higher than anything I’ve climbed, and even those low ones presented some beautiful panoramas, as they were blanketed in layered clouds.  It was as though they were floating, hiding in the sky, fading in and out of visibility as we climbed higher.  The plane rose in a slow spiral out of the valley, and so we got views of the increasingly rural and mountainous regions.  Soon enough, the snow-covered peaks appeared to the north.  It was breathtaking.  They, too, were blanketed in clouds, so we could never see a continuous mountain from the populated valley all the way to the summit. 

Rather, it was like looking at three separate layers of earth--the valley below the plane (then clouds) then the rugged green mountainsides carved by deep gorges and rivers (then clouds) then the jagged snowy tops.  At times, the mountains rose above the plane. 

We had been given a panorama drawing that illustrated the chain of mountains with labels, but among so many clouds there was no way we could identify what we were seeing.  We continued to climb, and I thought, well maybe that was it, and he’s going to do a u-turn.  We went higher still, and then more mountaintops popped out of the clouds.  Those first ones we’d seen (and I had thought might be Everest) weren’t even among the highest.  Crazy.

 

Shortly thereafter the flight attendant said we were turning around.  The whole flight was maybe 30 minutes.  I don’t actually know how close we came to Everest, but it couldn’t have been far.  I think it was probably in front of the plane.  When they said there were too many clouds, I don’t know if that meant it was entirely invisible or if they could see it but just not well.  If we go again, we’ll find out.  So our whole excursion was technically a failure, but by any other measure it was an awesome experience.